1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention is in the field of wireless communication and, more particularly, wireless interaction with the world wide web using cellular telephones.
2. History of Related Art
In the field of wireless communication, mobile telephone (cell phone) service providers have offered their subscribers the ability to access at least some web pages using their phones for some time. In a conventional implementation, a specialized web browser is installed on a cell phone. When the service is active (i.e., the cell phone is powered on and within the provider's network), the browser establishes a connection with a specialized gateway referred to as a Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) gateway. WAP is a collection of languages and tools for implementing services for mobile phones. The WAP gateway communicates with the mobile phones using a WAP protocol stack, which has significantly less overhead than a conventional HTTP request over TCP/IP. The WAP gateway converts WAP protocol requests into conventional HTTP requests and sends them to a conventional HTTP web server.
Referring now to FIG. 1, a block diagram of selected elements of a conventional wireless communication system 100 is depicted. In the depicted embodiment, system 100 includes a cell phone 102, a wireless access (WAP) gateway 106, and a web server 110 connected to WAP gateway 106. The user accesses web pages by opening a WAP-compliant browser 105 and enters a standard universal resource indicator (URI). WAP browser 105 sends a WAP-formatted request for the specified URI to WAP gateway 106. Gateway 106 converts the request to a conventional HTTP request and forwards the request to the appropriate web server 108 using conventional WWW technology (i.e., HTTP, TCP/IP, etc.). Web server 108 retrieves the requested content from the appropriate web page 110 and returns the content to WAP gateway 106. WAP gateway 106 converts the content to WAP-compliant content (including any content conversion required to accommodate the limited display of cell phone 102), and delivers the content to cell phone 102, and viewed by the user via WAP browser 105.
Although wireless web access, as it is described in the preceding paragraphs, is acceptable for many applications, it is not without drawbacks. The conventional web-enabled mobile phone is really two separate communication devices within a single package. The cellular telephone facilities are functionally distinct from the web facilitates. Because the two devices must share the common package, including a common I/O interface and keypad, web requests are entered using I/O elements that were largely developed specifically for telephone services. A web request, for example, is made by typing in the alphanumeric URL using the telephone keypad. Most cell phone users will be familiar with the difficulty in using a telephone keypad to enter a text string. More generally, telephone initiated web access as described above requires a highly specialized telephone (i.e., a wireless telephone with an installed WAP stack and WAP browser). Thus, while distinct phone/web mechanisms are not inherently objectionable, many users, especially casual users, may be more comfortable or efficient at using the phone service than the browser. Specifically, the process of using a cell phone's phone service is relatively intuitive for most cell phone users because of its strong similarity to using a landline phone. In contrast, using a mobile web browser installed on a cell phone is less intuitive because of the significant differences between the cell phone web browser and the standard web browser on a desktop or notebook computer including, the lack of a full keyboard that makes it extremely difficult to enter textural URIs of even moderate length.
It would be desirable to implement a system and method in which a web request could be initiated from a telephone, mobile or not, using phone-like services and request formats, such as by dialing a telephone number.